Category Industry Issues

White Noise – Distraction on an Epic Scale

Gary Nilsen 1 Comment

(A video version of this post can be found at: https://www.instagram.com/p/DeVAJZ8SR-Y/)

Back in July, I posted a book recommendation – Feed, by M.T. Anderson.

Though it has been many years since I read the book, my biggest take away from it was the idea that society was being dumbed down by the constant FEED of information every moment of their lives. In the book, the internet is basically implanted in a person’s brain, so ads and news and content are constantly flashing across a person consciousness.

Since my last two books were released in March of this year, I’ve been diligent in creating content for all the various platforms I belong to. Let me pick one for a moment – TikTok. I had read that having a platform on TikTok with hashtags attached to my content aiming at BookTok was a viable method for an author to spread the word about the books they’ve published.

I took a trip down the rabbit hole.

You should prepare yourself for the wave of videos that will confront you with endless tidbits and advice and how-to suggestions and best practices. No one person could ever consume the raw data or act on it or even decide which is good stuff and which is garbage. It’s the same with Instagram, Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn – a gazillion talking faces chatting away like a swarm of gnats buzzing in your ears and assaulting your eyes.

So, I’ve posted videos on all of them on topics ranging from books and writing to politics and religion trying to promote my novels and brand myself as the author behind them. In our world today, they amount to an infinitesimal drop in the ocean. You spend a little money to boost them so the algorithms that make these platforms work will send your content beyond the following you’ve managed to build and slowly…very slowly, watch you “follower” list increase.

This is just social media. I’ve discovered the same thing regarding my book listings on Amazon. My two books published in March were among 300,000 other new titles that month. I looked up how many titles are listed on Amazon and the result showed somewhere between 32.8 million and 50 million books. If you take the median of 41.4 million, then my three books on Amazon amounts to a percentage that starts with a number that has 7 zeros in front of it to the right of the decimal point (.00000007246%).

Something else I’ve witnessed. I logged on to my account with Dreamstime to license an image I wanted to use in a blog post. Now, on my computer, that picture pops up as an add when I want to play a game of FreeCell. Here’s another doozy. My wife looked up where she could buy some Manuka honey…on her phone…in our house…using our internet. Within hours, I was seeing posts on MY Facebook feed about…guess what? Manuka honey. WTF?? Watching television, every other add seems to be advocating one kind of drug or another – I can’t help but think the price of prescription drugs in American would drop significantly if the cost of pharmaceutical ads disappeared.

What does all this amount to?

WHITE NOISE

By the end of a day, unless you spend it quietly sitting on your couch, reading a book, or listening to music, your brain is so overloaded it’s impossible to make sense of the world. Are you like me? Do you sometimes wish to open the window and shout SHUT UP to the world or put a pillow over your head?

Where are we going with this? I can tell you, it’s no place good. This isn’t going to get better, it will only get worse. I wish I had a suggestion or an answer – I don’t. I have to do content creation if I want to compete for any part of your attention, but it’s a losing game due to The Dilution Effect – when a piece of output is weakened by the overproduction of other, common output. When whatever you’re talking about is overlapped with a thousand other competing sources of content.

Finally, there is Gresham’s Law – an economic principle where “easily duplicated, or low-quality” content “dilutes the ecosystem, making it increasingly difficult for high-quality” content “to maintain its percentage of audience attention.” Thank you Amazon for allowing just anyone to publish books without polish, thank you Barnes & Noble for allowing AI created content to be sold by you, and thank you AI for adding the existential threat to artists, actors, composers, writers, editors…well anyone who used to rely on innate talent to create something from scratch without technology.

It’s the White Noise like it was predicted in the novel Feed…and it’s volume is only getting louder.

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My 10 Rules for Writing and Marketing My Novels

Gary Nilsen Leave a comment

Since the time my first novel was released in 2016, so many things have changed. Finding ways to market against a tidal wave of new releases daily, considerations for AI usage, and which social media platforms to create content for. I’ve had a lot to think about over the last year or so. I’ve decided the way I move forward will be guided by a set of rules I’ve made for myself:

1 – Anything with my name on it will be written exclusively by me – AI will never touch any aspect of what I write.

2 – My developmental editor will be a human with knowledge and experience.

3 – My line editor will be a human with knowledge and experience.

4 – My proofreader will be a human with knowledge and experience.

5 – My cover art will be created with the help of graphic artists based on the information I give him/her in what I’m looking for. The person I hire will be directed that AI should not be used in creating their art.

Artwork by Tanvir Tareq

6 – I will resort to the creation of advertising images utilizing AI for situations that would be impossible to create from real photography – imagery that was imagined by me in writing settings.

AI Generated scene from my novel Flashback

7 – Whenever possible, I will hire actors in costume to populate characters in my advertising imagery to limit the use of AI.

Both models full length
Altered by my graphic artist

8 – Audiobooks of my work will be narrated by me or by professional voice actors – I will not use AI generated voice-overs.

9 – Going forward, I will not pay for reviews or “collaborations” with Book Influencers

10 – As I write in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres (so far), I will selectively create book trailers with AI assistance as it is not practical to hire actors to work in settings that don’t exist.

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Got My Newest Scam Attempt…

Gary Nilsen Leave a comment

So here is a new version of a scam that came at me over the last week or so.

Before anything else, I must state that a writer by the name of Sarah Moss is a real author with many published titles all of which are well reviewed.

A short time ago, I received a message on TikTok from Sarah Moss with the handle sarah.moss182 claiming she had come across my novel Flashback and wanted to connect – one writer to another. Naturally, I looked at the details of her profile and, like most writers, I thought it would be nice to connect with her. I looked up her author profile on Goodreads and Amazon and saw that Sarah Moss is a well-published and respected writer.

We messaged back and forth a couple of times. She asked me to exchange book links (Missed Clue #1 – if she was interested in Flashback, all she had to do was look it up on Amazon). She gave me hers – a link to Ghost Wall on Amazon. Then I went to paste my link in a message, but TikTok blocked it because they had to review it as it might be in violation of their TOS (Missed Clue #2 –  that had never happened with any other message exchange). I found that odd and tried to question TikTok what that meant – but admittedly their customer service is pretty poor and that got me nowhere. I told “Sarah” about it and she opened a group chat so we could correspond.

She showed me a graphic she’d ordered mine and it was in her cart. I then did the same for Ghost Wall. A few days later the book arrived and I posted a picture of it and sent it to her as proof that I’d purchased and received her book on the private group chat. She apologized for not having followed through on buying mine.

She mentioned my book didn’t have many reviews (Missed Clue #3 – I don’t think that would generally be a topic one author would talk to another author about). This was followed by her asking if I were open to suggestions. What was I going to say to a successful, well-published and reviewed author while I’m struggling to get my books out into the world?

Now I waited for an email from her book guru, Herbert. By next morning, there it was – Gmail address and all plus “Sarah” wasn’t even copied on the email, nor had “Sarah” copied me on her email to Herbert as would be normal for an email introduction.

I responded:

Guess what happened…

Screenshot

Result?

1 – Now armed against a different form of scam,

2 – I’m out $18.36,

3 – I own a copy of a very good book.

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Sharing Marketing Results – Goodreads, Bookfunnel, & Substack

Gary Nilsen Leave a comment

(A video version of this post can be found at: https://www.instagram.com/p/DcpI303PNVM/)

If you’ve published a book either through the self-publishing process or through a small, indy publisher, then you know how difficult it is to make your work discoverable given that Amazon publishes nearly 10,000 books a day. I still shake my head when I consider that number. Four million books a year. It used to be a rarity to find someone who had actually achieved the goal of writing one.

The sick thing is that on one hand it’s Amazon’s fault for creating a platform from which anyone can publish a book ten seconds after they write THE END, and yet they hold the largest market share for selling books. I’ve seen stats that claim Amazon accounts for nearly 70% of eBook sales and almost half of all print copies. It’s extremely frustrating for those of us who polish and polish our work, utilize developmental editors, line editors, and proofreaders before daring to expose our work to the world. It’s getting harder to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.

Your book is now out or about to be released; you figure the hard part is now complete, only to discover the challenge of marketing that book. It’s a labyrinthine nightmare. Building platforms with a website, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok/BookTok, Substack, YouTube all the while swatting away the scores of daily emails from scammers, each with a Gmail account offering to get you recognition and sales. Success requires trial and error using ads and boosting posts, doing promotions and giveaways.

Having said that, I thought I would share some results, or the lack thereof, with a couple of programs that I thought would pan out. I am truly curious to hear back from writers if they have had any measurable success with these.

First and foremost: Goodreads. I’ve maintained an author profile on Goodreads since 2011 when I timidly published my first short story. Then in 2016 my debut novel was published. I did a Goodreads Giveaway then and got some sales and some coveted reviews. Fast forward 10 years, after a writing hiatus, and two more of my books were published. I’ve always considered Goodreads as the go-to place for all things books, the place where readers and authors would connect. I created two campaigns, one for each book, giving away 10 copies of each in print format. I was super encouraged that each book had well over 3,000 requests for the Giveaway. Reviews had already started appearing on Amazon for each and my thinking was that these two campaigns would underwrite a sales drive once the winners were announced. Goodreads maintains that they suggest to each winner that a review would be welcomed by the author – indeed! In simple math, I thought that of 6,798 requests that weren’t winners might pursue obtaining a copy from either Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, or even my own website store – not all, but maybe a small percentage. The actual result? Zero sales and one review. Looking back at my author dashboard, there are 5,642 people who have the books listed as “to-read” and yet only one person seems to be doing so.

Now I get not everyone will like every book every author writes, but both books were being received well – mostly four or five stars – with a couple of awards here and there. Scratching my head, I can only surmise that the Goodreads platform, as it is today, is filled with a number of readers who use the Giveaway program to get free books. If they don’t win, they just move on to any of the other thousands of books that become available. Whatever drove them to request a copy, whether they were drawn to the cover or to the blurb describing the book wasn’t sufficient for a call to action once the Giveaway ended.

Worse still was the feeling of having egg on my face for my response to the winners. For one book, the first in a new series, I sent the book with a bookmark and a thank you note.

The other book, since it was the second in a series, I went so far as to send a free copy of the print book along with the book they won just to enhance their reading experience.

The total cost for the two programs which included printing, mailing supplies, bookmarks, thank you cards, postage (rates to Canada are horrific), and the Goodreads fees (you have to pay for a Giveaway promotion) came to $741.76. Return on Investment? Zero. The disappointment is palpable.

Another attempt at marketing was opening accounts with Bookfunnel and Substack. Bookfunnel is a platform to help independent authors and small publishers in delivering eBooks and audiobooks to readers. First you create a universal book link for each eBook title you upload. From there you can engage in promotions of which there are two basic kinds: sales promos and newsletter promos. Promos for sale are created that might include specific genre references you can join. Newsletter promos are to help in establishing and building an email list by having someone get a free copy of your book in exchange for an email address. Each kind of promo requires an entrant to post their participation at least once by linking the promo in their newsletter or blog. Hence my new account at Substack, a well-regarded platform to send posts, podcasts, and videos to your subscribers. The email addresses from your Bookfunnel promo can be loaded into Substack to grow your audience. At first, I thought this was working well. My books were being downloaded from Bookfunnel, and I was gathering a subscriber list. On the sales promos, my books were averaging 4% of the promo clicks and nearly 12% of all the views. Even if there was a percentage of a percentage of viewers who went on to purchase a copy of the book(s), I would have been happy. Sales results? Zero. Frustration #1. Over to Substack. To date, of the 57 new subscribers from my Bookfunnel promos, 14 have pulled their email off the site – that’s 25%. Frustration #2. Thankfully Bookfunnel is pretty cheap. The Mid-list Author Monthly plan only costs $20 per month.

Once again, I can only conclude that many readers jump in looking for free copies and then disappear again. That’s 61 books given away instead of 61 book sold. AND, not one review.

You may think that I’m sharing this information like sour grapes, but that wouldn’t be accurate. My hope is to accomplish two things. First, my fellow writers should be aware of what some realistic expectations might be if they haven’t so far and if you have, again, I’d sincerely like to hear from you about your experiences with Goodreads, Bookfunnel, and Substack. Second, if you are a reader and buyer of books, then please take a moment to acknowledge the work that a writer puts into their creation by offering a review, especially on Amazon since their algorithms seem to respond to verified sales and reviews – and remember it doesn’t have to be a “good” review, just a review. Negative reviews are as valuable as good ones.

I’m not giving up. I will continue to explore the benefits, and there are others, with Bookfunnel and Substack.

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